Order of Authors on the Authorship List (Academic Papers)

As promised from a previous blog post. I have been involved directly or indirectly in several academic papers where there was considerable unhappiness and acrimony over authorship, especially who should get first, last and corresponding author positions.

Intentional alphabetical listing of authorship in one of my older papers. The first-listed author here actually did the most work.

Part of this has to do with the concern about author contribution and credit. In the biomedical fields, there is cultural acceptance that the first-placed author has done the most work, whereas the last-placed author is the “senior author” who has provided the driving force for the work in terms of funding, guidance, and/or intellectual input. In one department where I worked, the first and final authors received the highest “points” (i.e. credit) for the papers they were involved in (which of course was also judged by the impact factors of the journals they were published in), which was tabulated and counted towards their annual performance. First and last author positions also counted more in an arcane way towards academic promotions.

There is one other development which is getting increasing popular, and which I favour. This involves putting up a listing of exact author contributions in each paper. Many of the more prestigious journals require it now, although this part of the manuscript is not vetted or verified. The difficult – but potentially worthwhile – part is getting institutional evaluation and promotion committees to adopt a more nuanced approach to assessing author contributions in academic papers.